“With the Manchester Method you become involved in real-life cases This is what makes it more like an expedition or adventure. You will have a partly planned route, although you are never quite sure what you will find yourself and where it might lead. This has resulted in an action-learning, project-based approach, known as the Manchester Method. “The difference between studying business cases and taking part in the Manchester Method is rather like the difference between visiting the zoo and going on safari,” says Professor Rickards. “It’s like having all the resources of a major corporation behind you.”As with most groups of would-be MBA students, this was a mainly male affair, with only three women participants: an IT specialist already studying part-time at the college, an American investment banker looking to get into the non-profit sector, and a Kenyan quantity surveyor keen to acquire the skills needed to return to Nairobi and help new businesses get off the ground. But with tales of former students completing the course while pregnant, or with new babies, the imbalance appeared to be a matter of take-up.By the end of the day energies were flagging, but a cheer-leading speech from Trevor Bish-Jones, chief executive officer of Woolworths, set people buzzing.

This gives students crucial exposure to the fast-changing business scene and the opportunity to relate the experience back to their theoretical learning.”At Manchester Business School, we believe that management education should not be confined to the classroom but should develop managers who can actually get things done,” explains Tudor Rickards, Professor of Creativity and Organisational Change. It makes the personal experience and background of each individual participant a source of learning for all students who take part.” This is echoed by Conor Neill, a recent graduate of the IESE MBA. “Having your decisions tested in front of 70 other students allows you to contrast the impact of different solutions to the same business problem.”Many business schools, on this side of the Atlantic in particular, favour an approach to learning that takes students closer to the coalface. The idea is that by analysing and discussing a blow-by-blow account of the pain and pressure points that a company has faced, under guidance of a faculty member, students can assume the role of the executive in the hot seat. They then have to decide what they would have done in his or her position had they been running the company at the time. Despite this, many MBA courses blend the “dry-run” case approach with a chance to experience a company from the inside via a brief consulting project.

A 10-page case study can only give a very restricted view.”Although the case study-based approach remains an important arrow in the MBA quiver, in the majority of schools students will be exposed to a mixture of learning methods.The growing trend for one-year, full-time MBA courses means that time spent away from the school is at a premium. It’s the ‘noise’ that surrounds a strategic issue in any business that is important to explore as much as the issue itself. This enables students to track a real-life business situation over a period of time and to add value to an ongoing analysis. As director Colin Eden explains: “We bring in senior managers who often expect help to resolve their companies’ immediate problems.

At the University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business, in addition to studying old cases, MBA students work extensively with live business issues. Exponents of the case approach point to the fact that, on returning to the world of work, MBA students should be better equipped to make tough decisions in a leadership role.Spain’s IESE, based in Barcelona, is one business school which enthusiastically follows the Harvard example, with much of its MBA course given over to analysing case studies in group seminars. IESE’s Professor of Managerial Economics, Franz Heukamp emphasises the communal learning benefits that flow from this method. “Managers need to be trained through well-prepared and selected simulations of real business situations The case study does exactly that. Today, 80 per cent of the Harvard course is based on this traditional classroom-based method which has since been adopted by business schools all over the world. On the surface, MBA courses can seem very similar in the methods they adopt. But it is worth finding out how they balance theory and practice to reflect the realities of the business world.

Do you dream about being Bill Gates? You may get the opportunity to put yourself in his shoes as you and your cohort of fellow MBA students debate the issues raised by a case study of Microsoft’s rise to global success. The question on the table is – how can Bill Gates retain the innovation and spirit of a small company in a rapidly expanding business environment? For 90 minutes, the fate of Microsoft will be in your hands.
This is one of thousands of examples of the case study approach to teaching the MBA which originated at Harvard Business School in the 1920s. Professor Arnold believes MBS now has a real chance to be part of that success story.. All of which has helped fuel the regeneration of the city itself. The new merged school gives him the chance to expand popular specialist Masters and executive programmes.Prices of popular courses outside the MBA may go up – possibly in 2005, or the following year. Manchester’s trademark 18-month MBA programme may change – if only for some students. Professor Arnold can envisage distance learning replacing the first half of the course – the core skills – and the second being worked up into a one-year MBA.But what kind of business school will these students enter? What is that elusive brand? “We have always seen ourselves as innovative, entrepreneurial, creative – even quirky in some ways,” he says, adding that this now chimes well with the city’s recent successes on the global stage – Manchester United’s rise, the Commonwealth Games, the Olympic bids, and the huge growth in creative-, technological- and service-based industries in the region.